NETWORKING

Growing up near Mount Tamalpais, aka The Sleeping Lady, aka Mount Tam, I would occasionally challenge myself with a ride up the mountain and over to Stinson Beach, armed with only water and a patch kit in case of a flat tire. It didn’t matter that the “real” road cyclists who seemed to be enjoying their ride effortlessly despite the steep roads and curves would routinely pass me by. It didn’t matter. Just being out…

When the world’s largest car producer builds their factory in the world’s largest car market, they use the most modern technologies. They don’t produce yesterday’s carbon fueled cars and they certainly don’t depend on yesterday’s networking technology. So when Volkswagen, the world-wide leader in car manufacturing decided to build their new plant in Anting, a town in Shanghai, China, they partnered with SAIC Motor, China’s largest automobile manufacturer, and focused solely on producing electric vehicles…

WeBuyCars was founded in 2001 in a warehouse in Pretoria East by the dynamic brother duo, Faan and Dirk Van der Walt. The business specializes in buying and selling pre-owned cars, and now has the largest showroom in South Africa. Spanning 8 warehouses, 17 regional teams, and 190 buyers, the Van der Walt brothers prioritize immediacy, reliability, and convenience in their business model. The Van der Walt brothers started the car supermarket, WeBuyCars, in 2001…

  My first day at Cisco was in August of 2020 as a Financial Analyst in Cisco’s Leaders in Finance and Technology (LIFT) program. LIFT is a two-year full time rotational program designed for new college graduates to experience working in four different areas of finance, while receiving world class training and mentorship – though our cohort would be starting our journey virtually. I was initially very skeptical of what the virtual onboarding and work…

SD-WAN is the talk of the town these days. And rightly so – it’s a fantastic technology that improves application performance by allowing enterprises to broaden the use of faster, less expensive broadband Internet services in addition to private MPLS connections while delivering superior end user quality of experience. Unlike traditional router-centric approaches, managing WAN connections is extremely simple – and automated – with SD-WAN. This means less time spent executing complex CLI commands and…

The final blog in our 4 part Connected IT Insights series. If this pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that work is not a place you go — it’s something that you do from anywhere. This looks unlikely to change anytime soon. Our customers will have more employees than ever before permanently working in a remote or hybrid capacity. This has profound implications for teams and what IT can do to empower them. When stay-at-home…

As data center workloads spiral upward, a growing number of enterprises are looking to artificial intelligence (AI), hoping that technology will enable them to reduce the management burden on IT teams while boosting efficiency and slashing expenses. AI promises to automate the movement of workloads to the most efficient infrastructure in real time, both inside the data center as well as in a hybrid-cloud setting comprised of on-prem, cloud, and edge environments. As AI transforms…

Howdy out there in automation land! It has been 1 year…. 1 year exactly since my last blog. I do apologize to the readers but with the year we’ve had, I am sure you understand. A lot of change in our work environments, a lot of change in our world. However, Pondering Automation is back and in a new place/home. This blog will move to the developer blogs section of cisco.com now and will be…

There has been plenty of discussion about the critical role the Australian TAFE sector will play in Australia’s economic response and recovery from COVID-19. A lot of the media focus tends to be on funding models and incentives, including ways for governments to make TAFE sustainable during a period of significant challenge. While this focus on high-level funding settings is understandable, it doesn’t really provide an accurate picture of what’s happening at an individual institute…

In my blog The Network of the Future: Where We’re Going, I outlined the Cisco IT networking vision and strategy.  A strategy for how our network would be smarter and faster—using automation and collecting data to enable faster innovation, cost optimization, and reduced security vulnerabilities. A lot has changed since I wrote that blog – not the least of which is a pandemic that has changed our lives tremendously and an increasingly dynamic business environment…